Mystery in White (British Library Crime Classics) Read online

  This edition published in 2014 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Originally published in London in 1937 by Wright & Brown

  Copyright © Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon 2014

  Introduction copyright © Martin Edwards 2014

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5770 8

  Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

  Printed in England by TJ International

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER I

  THE SNOWBOUND TRAIN

  CHAPTER II

  THE INVISIBLE TRACK

  CHAPTER III

  STRANGE SANCTUARY

  CHAPTER IV

  TEA FOR SIX

  CHAPTER V

  NEWS FROM THE TRAIN

  CHAPTER VI

  SNEEZES OBLIGATO

  CHAPTER VII

  THE RETURN OF SMITH

  CHAPTER VIII

  IN A FOUR-POSTER BED

  CHAPTER IX

  STUDIES IN ETHICS

  CHAPTER X

  WOMAN DISPOSES

  CHAPTER XI

  JESSIE CONTINUES HER DIARY

  CHAPTER XII

  DINNER CON FUOCO

  CHAPTER XIII

  EXHIBIT B

  CHAPTER XIV

  EXHIBITS A AND C

  CHAPTER XV

  FIGHTING THE TIDE

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE IMAGINATION OF ROBERT THOMSON

  CHAPTER XVII

  REFLECTIONS OF THE PAST

  CHAPTER XVIII

  WHAT HAPPENED TO DAVID

  CHAPTER XIX

  ADDITIONS TO THE PARTY

  CHAPTER XX

  THE NEW ARRIVALS

  CHAPTER XXI

  NORA'S STORY

  CHAPTER XXII

  LIGHTS OUT

  CHAPTER XXIII

  “ONE WHO KNOWS”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE RED TRAIL

  CHAPTER XXV

  TWENTY YEARS AFTER

  CHAPTER XXVI

  THE OFFICIAL VERSION

  CHAPTER XXVII

  JESSIE WINDS IT UP

  INTRODUCTION

  MARTIN EDWARDS

  Mystery in White is an entertaining story of crime at Christmas, written by an author who – although today little-known – was a major figure during the Golden Age of murder between the two world wars. No less an authority than Dorothy L. Sayers pronounced that ‘Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures’, and the storyline of Mystery in White allows him ample scope to demonstrate that skill.

  The set-up is enticing, if superficially familiar. A strange assortment of passengers travelling by train during a blizzard find themselves caught in an acute dilemma when the track becomes impassable. Yet despite some similarity in the initial set-up, Farjeon’s story, first published in 1937, really owes nothing in terms of structure or solution to Agatha Christie’s classic Murder on the Orient Express, which appeared three years earlier. This time, the locale is not a remote part of continental Europe, but the English countryside, and the train is not the legendary and luxurious trans-continental express, but a third-class compartment on the 11.37 from St Pancras (or should that be Euston? both those great stations are mentioned in the very first chapter.)

  Having created expectations in the reader of one kind of detective story, Farjeon promptly disrupts them by directing events down a very different track. Above all, this is not a whodunit set on a train, and the plot thickens like the snow once a small group of travellers abandon the security of their carriage to trudge through the ‘strange fairyland’ outside. Spotting a lonely house, they ring the bell, but receive no answer. The door is unlocked, and when they venture inside, they discover that a fire is burning, and tea has been laid. Yet the place appears to be deserted, and events take an increasingly sinister turn after the arrival of a mysterious Cockney who says his name is Smith

  Rather than following in Christie’s footsteps, Farjeon was, in fact, anticipating the mise en scène of her short story ‘Three Blind Mice’, which was published almost a decade after this book, and later adapted into that classic stage mystery, The Mousetrap. The cosy yet spooky setting of a country house, cut off from the outside world by deep snow, is a superbly atmospheric backdrop for a murder story, and Farjeon uses it to good effect. His main characters are nicely differentiated, and include a chorus girl, an elderly bore, and Mr Edward Maltby of the Royal Psychical Society, as well as the brother and sister who are the lead protagonists. The narrative twists and turns so that the reader never quite knows what to expect next. This combination of pleasing ingredients makes for a light and agreeable read.

  Mystery in White is the work of a capable writer at the height of his powers. By the time it arrived on the shelves, Farjeon had published more than two dozen novels, the most famous of which was No. 17. Originally a stage play, this story provided the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen, a film thriller from 1932. The movie is not one that the Master of Suspense remembered fondly; he told François Truffaut that it was a ‘disaster’, and felt the core elements were too clichéd. For his part, Farjeon quietly perfected the marriage in his fiction of genial humour with suspense and action, and earned considerable acclaim in a literary career lasting for more than thirty years.

  Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955), known to those close to him as Joe, came from a family of high achievers in the world of popular culture. His first names came from his grandfather, the American actor Joseph Jefferson, whose most famous role was Rip Van Winkle. Jefferson’s daughter Maggie married Benjamin Farjeon, who had been born in Whitechapel to an impoverished family of Jewish immigrants, and became a prolific and successful novelist. In addition to Joe, their children included Harry, a composer, Herbert, a drama critic and director, and Eleanor, a renowned author of poetry, memoirs and stories for young people, who also wrote the words of ‘Morning Has Broken’, a hymn which after her death became a Top Ten hit for Cat Stevens.

  When writing No. 17, Joe gave his father’s first name to a tramp with a penchant for trouble and a taste for amateur detection. Ben the tramp later appeared in a string of novels such as Ben on the Job (1932), one of surprisingly few Farjeon titles to have been reprinted during the past thirty years. Ben is a likeable character, and so, by all accounts, was his creator. For all the chill of the Christmas-time snow in Mystery in White, there are repeated clues to Farjeon’s amiable personality in the good humour that shines through from start to finish. Towards the end of the book, a police inspector, belatedly arrived on the scene, exclaims, ‘Four murders in a dozen hours! I reckon I’ve earned my bit of turkey.’ But the official version of events is not necessarily the whole truth, and this is yet another reason why it is so good to see this enjoyable Yuletide yarn back in print after many years of undeserved neglect.

  CHAPTER I

  THE SNOWBOUND TRAIN

  THE Great Snow began on the evening of December 19th. Shoppers smiled as they hurried home, speculating on the chances of a White Christmas. Their hopes were dampened when they turned on their wireless to learn from the smooth impersonal voice of the B.B.C. announcer that an anti-cyclone was callously wending its way from the North-West of Ireland; and on the 20th the warmth arrived, turning the snow to drizzle and the thin white crust to muddy brown.

  “Not this year!” sighed the disappointed sentimentalists as they slipped sadly through the slush.
r />   But on the 21st the snow returned, this time in earnest. Brown became white again. The sounds of traffic were deadened. Wheel marks, foot marks, all marks, were blotted out as soon as they were made. The sentimentalists rejoiced.

  It snowed all day and all night. On the 22nd it was still snowing. Snowballs flew, snowmen grew. Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended. In the evening the voice of the announcer, travelling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming. The anti-cyclone from the North-West of Ireland had got lost in it.

  More snow came. It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher. Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop. People wondered whether it would ever stop.

  It grew beyond the boundaries of local interest. By the 23rd it was news. By the 24th it was a nuisance. Practical folk cursed. Even the sentimentalists wondered how they were going to carry out their programmes. Traffic was dislocated. Cars and motor-coaches lost themselves. Railway gangs fought snowdrifts. The thought of the thaw, with its stupendous task of conversion, became increasingly alarming.

  The elderly bore, however, who formed one of half a dozen inmates of a third-class compartment on the 11.37 from Euston, refused to be alarmed. In fact, although the train had come to an unofficial halt that appeared to be permanent, he pooh-poohed the whole thing as insignificant with the irritating superiority of a world-traveller.

  “If you want to know what snow’s really like,” he remarked to the young lady next to him, “you ought to try the Yukon.”

  “Ought I?” murmured the young lady obediently.

  She was a chorus girl, and her own globe-trotting had been limited to the provincial towns. Her present destination was Manchester, which in this weather seemed quite far enough off.

  “I remember once, in Dawson City, we had a month of snow,” the bore went on, while the young man on his other side thought, “My God, is he starting off again?” “It was in ‘99. No, ‘98. Well, one or the other. I was a kid at the time. We got sick of the damn stuff!”

  “Well, I’m sick of this damn stuff,” answered the chorus girl, twisting her head towards the window. All she saw was a curtain of white flakes. “How much longer are we going to wait here, does anybody think? We must have stopped an hour.”

  “Thirty-four minutes,” corrected the tall, pale youth opposite, with a glance at his wrist-watch. He did not have spots, but looked as though he ought to have had. His unhealthy complexion was due partly to the atmosphere of the basement office in which he worked, and partly to a rising temperature. He ought to have been in bed.

  “Thank you,” smiled the chorus girl. “I see one’s got to be careful when you’re around!”

  The clerk smiled faintly. He was impressed by the chorus girl’s beauty. A real, die-hard platinum blonde. Marvellous person to take out to supper, if one had the courage for that sort of thing. He believed the bore would have had the courage and had noted the man’s quick little, half-sly glances between his egotistical statements. He even believed the chorus girl might accept an invitation. There was something vulnerable about her which her assurance attempted to cloak. But the clerk was even more impressed by the other young lady in the compartment, the one who was sitting on the other side of the bore. To take her out to supper would provide more than a momentary thrill; it would entirely upset one’s work. She was dark. She had a tall, supple figure. (The chorus girl was rather small.) He felt sure she played a good game of tennis, swam and rode. He visualised her cantering over moors and sailing over five-barred gates, with her brother trying vainly to catch her up. Her brother was sitting in the corner opposite her. You knew it was her brother from their conversation, and you could also see it from their resemblance. They called each other David and Lydia.

  Lydia was the next to speak.

  “This is getting the limit!” she exclaimed. Her voice had a low, rich quality. “What about interviewing the guard again and asking if there’s any hope of moving before next June?”

  “I asked him ten minutes ago,” said the bore. “I won’t repeat what he said!”

  “Not necessary,” yawned David. “We have imaginations.”

  “Yes, and it seems we’ll need our imaginations to-night!” chimed in the chorus girl. “I’ll have to imagine I’m in Manchester!”

  “Will you? We shall have to imagine we are at a Christmas house-party,” smiled Lydia, “sleeping on downy beds. By the way, if we’re in for an all-night session I hope the railway company will supply hot-water bottles!” Suddenly she caught the clerk’s eye. She surprised the admiration in it, and was kind. “What will you have to imagine?” she asked. The catastrophe of the snowdrift and the camaraderie of Christmas were loosening tongues. The bore alone had needed no encouragement.

  The clerk coloured, though his cheeks were already flushed with fever.

  “Eh? Oh! An aunt,” he jerked.

  “If she’s like mine, she’s best left to the imagination!” laughed Lydia. “But then she probably isn’t.”

  The clerk’s aunt was not like Lydia’s aunt. She was even more trying. But her dutiful nephew visited her periodically, partly for the sake of his financial future, and partly because he had a secret weakness for lonely people.

  A little silence fell upon the party. The only one who thought it mattered was the chorus girl. A nervous restlessness possessed her soul, and she declared afterwards that she was sure she had been the first to move unconsciously into the shadow of coming events. “Because, goodness, I was all on edge,” she said, “and why should I have been, I mean nothing had happened yet, and so far the old man in the corner hadn’t opened his mouth. I don’t believe he’d even opened his eyes, he might have been dead. And then, don’t forget, he was right opposite me! And they say I’m psychic.”

  But her vague anticipations were not centred solely in the old man in the corner. She, too, had noticed the quick little, half-sly glances of the elderly bore, who, as she knew, was not too elderly to think about her in a certain way. She had also noticed the clerk’s eyes upon her leg, and the rather studious avoidance of any such vulgar interest on the part of the other young man. If Jessie Noyes was very conscious of her physical attractions she claimed it was her business to be. She was well aware of both her power and the limitation of her power, and while the power, despite its small thrills, gave her a secret dread, the limitation was a secret sorrow. How wonderful to be able to conquer a man wholly and eternally, instead of being just an ephemeral taste! Still, she was not bitter. She was anxious and nervous and warm. Life was life....

  Driven now by her restlessness, and finding the silence unendurable, she broke it by suddenly exclaiming:

  “Well, let’s go on! That’s only four of us! What will you have to imagine?”

  The question was addressed, not too wisely, to the bore.

  “Me? Imagine?” he answered. “I don’t know it’s my habit to imagine. Take things as they come—good, bad, or indifferent—that’s my motto. You learn that when you’ve knocked around as I have.”

  “Perhaps I can be more interesting,” said the old man in the corner, opening his eyes suddenly.

  He was neither dead nor asleep. As a matter of fact, he had heard every word that had been uttered since the train had steamed out of Euston at 11.37, and the probability of this made more than one of the five people who now turned to him feel a little uncanny. Not that he had heard anything he should not have heard; but a man who listens with his eyes closed, and whose eyes themselves become so peculiarly alive when they are opened—these eyes were like little lamps illuminating things invisible to others—is not the best tonic for frayed nerves.

  “Please do, sir,” answered David, after a short pause. “And invent a really good story for us—ours have been most definitely dull.”

  “Oh, mine is interesting without any invention,” replied the old man, �
��and also, incidentally, rather appropriate to the season. I am on my way to interview King Charles the First.”

  “Really! With head, or without?” inquired David politely.

  “With, I trust,” the old man responded. “I am informed he is quite complete. We are to meet in an old house at Naseby. Frankly I am not very confident that the interview will occur. Charles the First may be bashful, or he may turn out to be just some ordinary cavalier hiding from Cromwell and Fairfax. After three hundred years, identity becomes a trifle confused.” He smiled with cynical humour. “Or, again, he may be—non est. Simply the imagination of certain nervous people who think they have seen him about. But, of course,” he added, after pursing his thin lips, “there is some possibility that he really is about. Yes, yes; if that over-maligned and over-glorified monarch did visit the house on the day of his defeat, and if the house’s walls have stored up any emotional incidents that I can set free, we may add an interesting page to our history.”

  “Don’t think me rude,” exclaimed Lydia, “but do you really and truly believe in that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly what do you mean by ‘that sort of thing’?” asked the old man.

  His tone was disapproving. The elderly bore took up the battle.

  “Spooks and ghosts!” he grunted. “Pooh, I say! Stuff and nonsense! I’ve seen the Indian rope trick—yes, and exploded it! In Rangoon. ‘23.”

  “Spooks and ghosts,” repeated the old man, his disapproval now diverted to the bore. The guard’s voice sounded from a corridor in the distance. Though faint, the source of that was solid enough. “H’m—terms are deceptive. The only true language has no words, which explains, sir, why some people who speak too many words have no understanding.”

  “Eh?”

  “Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably.”